Swansea boss Michael Laudrup supports paying rival teams to win games

Michael Laudrup says he has no problem with clubs offering financial incentives for rivals clubs to win games.

The Swansea manager was asked about the current Italian match-fixing scandals because of his experience of playing in Serie A. But instead of straight-batting the questions, he strangely decided to open a debate on what constitutes match-fixing.

“The worst match fixing I’ve heard was what happened in Italy before I came there in the beginning of the 80s, where somebody bought three or four of the players in a team to lose a game.

“That means that seven or eight players in a team were playing to win, like normal, and three or four of them just to lose.

But he went on to differentiate between Spanish football’s ‘suitcase’ custom of paying a third-party team to win a match. An example of how that might work would have been Manchester United offering a massive payment to QPR for defeating Manchester City on the final day of last season.

Laudrup added: “It’s just a bonus. For me, match-fixing is somebody pays someone to lose a game.

“In Spain where there’s one or two matches left in a season we always talked about the suitcases.

“But the suitcases is to win – I don’t see anything bad about that.

“I think we have to define very well what is match-fixing because there’s different levels, I think.”